Experimental and numerical study of friction and braking characteristics of rolling tires

Throughout the tire industry, virtual testing has been widely adopted in the design process. Both static deformation and dynamic response of the tire rolling on the road must be accurately predicted to evaluate the handling performance of a tire. Unfortunately, experimental characterization of rubber compound frictional properties is limited, and therefore, the Coulomb friction model is still often used in finite element (FE) simulations. To overcome this limitation, a different strategy is developed to capture observed effects of dry friction. The proposed friction model is decomposed into the product of a contact pressure dependent part and a slip velocity dependent part. The identification of the parameters of the slip velocity dependent part, using measured axle forces, is presented in this paper. The complete phenomenological friction model is coupled to a FE model of the tire under testing. A steady-state transport approach is used to efficiently compute the steady-state longitudinal slip characteristics, which show good quantitative agreement with experiments.